As is well known in the spinning art, it is common practice for the traverse ring of a spinning frame to apply several wraps of yarn about the base portion of the spindle upon which a package of yarn is being built, and these underwound wraps are allowed to remain on the lower portion of the spindle after the yarn package is doffed. After a period of time, these underwound yarn wraps will accumulate to an extent that they will interfere with the proper operation of the spinning frame, and it is therefore necessary to periodically clean the lower portion of the spindles by removing the accumulated yarn wraps thereon.
The most common method of removing the aforesaid yarn wraps is a manual operation which entails cutting the yarn wraps and physically pulling them off of the spindle. It will be apparent that this method is both time consuming and expensive, particularly since it usually results in a substantial down time for the spinning frame while the large number of spindles thereof are serially cleaned.
Additionally, several prior art patents disclose mechanical devices which are designed to assist in the removal of such yarn wraps. For wraps U.S. Pat. No. 3,263,407, issued Aug. 2, 1966, and U.S. Pat. No. 3,426,518, issued Feb. 11, 1969, both disclose frame members having fixed, projecting brush bristles attached thereto, such frame members being manually moved along a rail to permit the brush bristles to contact the lower portion of spinning frame spindles. In U.S. Pat. No. 3,312,051, a yarn removal device is disclosed which is generally similar to the two aforesaid prior art devices and which additionally includes a suction nozzle located adjacent the yarn removing element whereby removed yarn warps are carried away by the suction nozzle. Although the brushes in the aforesaid prior art devices may be mounted to have some relative movement with respect to the frames in which they are mounted whereby they can be urged against the spindles, they are otherwise fixed to the frame and must rely solely upon the rotation of the spindles, against which they are pressed, for removing the yarn wraps. Additionally, all of these prior art devices suffer the disadvantage of having to be manually moved along the rail of the spinning frame. It is believed that this manual movement is generally necessary to obtain full cleaning of the spindles by these devices because the generally fixed brushes may not remove all of the yarn wraps, particularly tightly wound wraps, in one pass of the brushes across the spindles, and the operator may manually cause the brushes to dwell longer at particular spindles, or to be passed several times across some of the same spindles.
In accordance with the present invention, spindle cleaning apparatus is provided which includes a plurality of individually mounted positively rotated brushes that are arranged to positively engage the spindles, and the apparatus may be driven along the spinning frame to remove automatically substantially all of the underwound wraps on such spindles.